Artist and activist Emma Campbell’s photo series When They Put Out Their Hands Like Scales; Journeys (W.T.P.O.T.H.L.S; Journeys) was photographed in 2012 as she travelled from Belfast, Northern Ireland to abortion clinics in Liverpool, Manchester and London. Campbell created images of the journeys rather than the women who make them because she wanted to avoid “making photographs of victims.”73 Rather than using photography to fetishise the photographed person by reducing her to a single image without context, she establishes what Ariella Azoulay, in her theorisation of photography, conceives as a social relation. Azoulay’s approach to photography has less to do with the photograph itself than with the set of relations within which it is produced and consumed. These are relations between the photographer, the person who is photographed, the location, and a viewer who is summoned to take responsibility for what she sees in the image.74
Read More